Federal revenues rose 17.5 percent to $144.3 billion last month from $122.8 billion a year earlier.

The government’s outlays totaled $337.9 billion, for a monthly deficit of $193.5 billion that was lower than the $203.5 billion deficit the previous February, according to the Treasury Department.

The $377.4 billion deficit in the first five months of the current fiscal year compares with a $494 billion shortfall between October 2012 and February 2013. The government ran a deficit of $680 billion all of fiscal year 2013, less than half of the shortfall five years earlier.

“The gap this year will narrow to $514 billion, or 3 percent of gross domestic product, from 9.8 percent of GDP in 2009,” the Congressional Budget Office said in a report last month, as Kasia Klimasinska reported here for Bloomberg News.

Even as the deficit narrows, more Americans disapprove than approve of how President Barack Obama and federal lawmakers are handling the issue.

Fifty-seven percent of Americans “aren’t happy with the president’s handling of the deficit compared with 34 percent who approve of it,” Bloomberg’s Julianna Goldman reported this week for a story on a Bloomberg National Poll conducted March 7-10.

“On the bright side, Obama’s disapproval rating on that issue is 6 percentage points lower than it was in December,” she wrote.